Quirky stamp collections on display

Stamps of all shapes and sizes, and from different parts of the world, are on display at the Wesley Methodist Church on 13th Ave.

The annual stamp fair, help by the Tauranga and District Stamp Club, has attracted dealers from as far afield as New Plymouth and Auckland to Tauranga for the two day event.


David Bevan with one of the oldest collectors items for sale for $300 which is, a letter from 1783 which predated stamps by nearly 60 years sent from Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) to Bordeaux, France.


Elvis stamps from Rwanda.

Club president Ross Haycock says there are six dealers and a club bench as well.

'We do this big one once a year and we do two or three smaller ones throughout the year but this is the big event.

'Some of the dealers have really older or unusual stamps which can range up to $2000.

A $2000 stamp would be one of the first issues dating back to 1840 in England and it would be somewhat of a perfect example.”

Ross says it might have a special cancellation from a post office, the interesting thing there is that when those stamps were first issued in 1840, the first run was a penny black which was then superseded by a penny pink.

'It was superseded because when they cancelled it with a black stamp, they couldn't tell if it had been cancelled so they changed the colour.

'Of the second stamp, more than a billion were produced, so the fact that it's old doesn't make it rare.” He says so many of them were obliterated.

'To have something that is very valuable has to be old and unmarked. The other value is something that went wrong, the stamp was printed upside down or the perforations on one side are the wrong size.

'Everyone has different ideas on what they want. It can get quite quirky with what people collect. I know one person who has a huge ceramic stamp collection. His collections has stamps from all over the world featuring pottery or some form of ceramics.” There is another gentlemen at the event who is selling his penny black collection. He has one of the biggest collections in the country, says Ross.

'He's not selling it here today, he's selling it through catalogues.”


William, 9, and Marnie, 7, Dunlop checking out the coins.

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